Washington --The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (Commission) today
issued proposed amendments to its rules regarding the computation,
documentation and disclosure of the past performance of trading programs
offered to the public by commodity trading advisors (CTAs).

The issue of how best to compute rate of return (ROR) for
partially-funded, or "notionally funded," accounts of CTAs has
been a subject of discussion by the Commission and industry participants
for many years. Central to this issue is the question of which amount
should be used as the denominator in the ROR calculation -- actual funds
or the nominal account size agreed upon between the CTA and the client to
establish the client's level of trading in the CTA's
program.

The proposed rule amendments respond to a National Futures Association
(NFA) proposal to adopt nominal account size as the uniform basis for
CTAs to calculate RORs. The NFA proposal was presented in the
Commission's June 1998 concept release regarding performance data and
disclosure for CTAs and commodity pools. After evaluating comments filed
in response to that release, and having carefully considered the benefits
and drawbacks of each method of calculating ROR, the Commission is
proposing rule revisions to provide that ROR be computed by dividing net
performance by the nominal account size. Consistent with this proposed
change in the computational method, the proposed rules' documentation
and disclosure requirements focus on conveying a numerical sense of the
impact of partial funding on the leverage and volatility applicable to
the client's account. The proposal also seeks to ensure that
customers are not misled as to the amount of actual funds managed by a
CTA.

These proposed rule amendments were published in the Federal
Register on August 2, 1999, (64 FR 41843).
Copies may be obtained by contacting the Commission's Office of the
Secretariat, Three Lafayette Centre, 1155 21st Street, NW,
Washington, DC 20581, (202) 418-5100, or by accessing the
Commission's website at
www.cftc.gov.